Volvo’s at it again. As you may remember, in October of 2000, Volvo showed great confidence in web marketing by launching - with much fanfare - its new S60 sedan exclusively online. As a result, Volvo said in January of 2001 that there's little chance they'll use the same Internet-only strategy again. This year, they’re trying something completely different - integration.

In the Interactive TV: Reality & Opportunity report released today, eMarketer estimates that the number of US households with interactive television (iTV) will jump by 74% from 12.7 million last year to 22.1 million in 2002, representing over 20% of all US households.

comScore Networks has released the results of its latest netScore report of worldwide and U.S. Internet surfing activity for the month of February 2002, and while it looks like the overall Internet population maintained the peak level achieved in January, specific preferences of Web users around the world reveal the broad and varying role of the Internet in so many aspects of people's lives.

A few days ago I reported that according to Taylor Nelson Sofres' CMR, ad spending took an even bigger hit in 2001 than originally forecast - total measured media spending was down 9.7% to $98.21 billion in 2001, from $108.81 billion in 2000. A number of people emailed back asking where online media fit into the picture, since there was no mention of online ad spending in the report. Well, that question was answered this morning by CMR’s Internet division CMRi.

A few months ago at the @dTech show, when eMarketer’s Geoff Ramsey showed an ad covering up almost all of CNNfn’s homepage, people in the audience chuckled. Even though Geoff was talking about bigger banners achieving better results, a full-page ad was not something online ad execs were too enthusiastic about. Lack of enthusiasm doesn’t seem to have prevented the development of technology that makes really huge ads possible, though.

Is it me, or are Nielsen//NetRatings and Jupiter Media Metrix releasing an unusually high number of research reports since they decided not to merge? Regardless of their motives, Nielsen did announce some significant findings today. Their Fourth Quarter 2001 Global Internet Trends report on Internet access and penetration, says there are a total of 498 million people worldwide who now have Internet access from home.

Not that we needed final confirmation of 2001 being a horrible year for the advertising industry, but according to tallies released this morning by Taylor Nelson Sofres' CMR, ad spending took an even bigger hit in 2001 than originally forecast.

According to research by Taylor Nelson Sofres Information Technology, around nine out of ten companies in the US (93%) and UK (86%) are now using the Internet for activities such as CRM, marketing, order fulfillment and selling to deal with customers. In contrast, six out of ten (60%) organizations in Japan and fewer than four out of ten (36%) organizations in France are using the Internet as a marketing channel or customer service mechanism.

Sorry to pick the weekend to harp on something negative, but today’s topic is one advertisers should be paying more attention to. It’s the age-old issue of website functionality. mLife really brought it to the forefront when almost no one could get to their website following the Super Bowl, but now it looks like the main Olympics website didn’t really ensure that everyone can easily access their site either.